A twice-weekly syndicated newspaper column on California public affairs.

Monday, December 19, 2016

POSSIBLE MUSLIM REGISTRY RAISES MORAL QUESTIONS

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, JANUARY 3, 2017, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“POSSIBLE MUSLIM REGISTRY RAISES
MORAL QUESTIONS”

The scene was a festive holiday-season
dinner with guests from both Northern and Southern California. But the
discussion grew serious as the question arose of whether President-elect Donald
Trump would really try to set up a national registry of citizen and resident
Muslims in America as an anti-terror tactic – which he advocated while running
for office – with no one knowing what
might come next.

“If that happens, I would immediately
go and register as one,” declared one youthful woman, a non-Islamic mother of
two small children.

Days later, more than 600 computer
engineers and programmers for California-based high-tech giants like Google and
Twitter said they would refuse to take part in setting up or operating such a
database, even if it cost them their high-paying jobs. This defiant list has
now surpassed 2,000.

Trump’s staff, however, says he never
advocated a registry based on religion, but when asked about it in an NBC-TV
interview in November 2015, he said “"Oh I would certainly implement that.
Absolutely."

All this evoked the actions of Danish
citizens when German leader Adolf Hitler ordered a roundup of occupied
Denmark’s 7,800 Jews on Oct. 1, 1943, in the midst of his World War II campaign
to exterminate Europe’s 6 million Jews.

Christian Danes first alerted all
Danish Jews to hide, then staged a two-night boatlift taking more than 7,200
Jews across a narrow strait from Helsingor (Shakespeare’s Elsinore), north of
Copenhagen, to neutral Sweden.

The Danes’ King Christian X became a historic hero by actively
encouraging this.

It’s uncertain that Trump will order a
Muslim registry, although his transition team’s chief advisor on immigration,
Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, has said he advised Trump to establish a
list of immigrants and visitors from countries where terrorist organizations
are active. Read: refugees and others from predominantly Islamic places like
Syria, Iran, Iraq, Egypt, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Libya, Morocco, Tunisia,
Sudan, Somalia and Algeria.

Some Trump allies cited as a legal
precedent for such a registry the roundup and internment of Japanese-American
Nisei in remote, primitive camps just after the Pearl Harbor attack that
brought America into World War II. Never mind that the U.S. government under
President Ronald Reagan long ago apologized and paid reparations for those
actions.

Kobach, a longtime anti-illegal
immigrant activist, wrote Arizona’s 2010 SB 1070, which required police to stop
anyone who looked like an immigrant (read: Latino) and demand documents showing
they were authorized to be in this country. Courts later declared the law
unconstitutionally discriminatory.

Any registry or database of the type
Trump proposed during his campaign would probably need cooperation from
America’s large high-tech companies, most headquartered in this state, just as
President George W. Bush’s post-9/11 effort to track phone traffic by potential
terrorists needed cooperation by the likes of AT&T and Verizon. But the
subject did not arise when more than a dozen mostly-Californian high-tech
moguls met with Trump in mid-December.

At first, only California-based
Twitter and Facebook took refusal stances on any such Muslim registry. Later,
Apple, Google, IBM, Uber and Microsoft jointed them, possibly prodded by the
stances of thousands of their employees.

When TheIntercept.com, a
self-described “adversarial journalism” website, asked major tech firms what
they would do about a registry, Microsoft
initially said “We’re not going to talk about hypotheticals at this point,” and
provided a link to a company blog advocating “not just diversity among all the
men and women who work here, but inclusive culture.”

What several companies at first did
not see, but Twitter and Facebook apparently understood right away, was that if
they said nothing they would be tacitly approving the idea of a religion-based
list.

The moral question here is similar to
what confronted Danes in 1943, even if the potential consequences for people
resisting a Muslim list or database are far less threatening than the
shoot-on-sight tactics carried out by Nazi SS troopers when they encountered or
caught someone defying an occupation regime order.

The bottom line: Tarring all Muslims as potential terrorists would
be a form of discrimination somewhat comparable to rounding up America’s Nisei,
especially since the vast majority of Islamic-Americans have absolutely no
interest in or record of promoting anything anti-American.

-30-
Email Thomas Elias at
tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising
Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now
available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, go to www.californiafocus.net

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About Me

Thomas Elias writes the syndicated California Focus column, appearing twice weekly in 88 newspapers around California, with circulation over 2.2 million.
He has won numerous awards from organizations like the National Headliners Club, the California Newspaper Publishers Association, the Los Angeles Press Club, and the California Taxpayers Association. He has been nominated three times for the Pulitzer Prize in distinguished commentary.
Elias is the author of two books, "The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government's Campaign to Squelch It" (now in its third edition; also published in Japanese and recently optioned for a television movie) and "The Simpson Trial in Black and White," co-authored with the late Dennis Schatzman.